Lockheed Martin adds inflight electronic PIREP capabilities

Lockheed Martin Flight Services has launched its 9.1 release, which includes several enhancements, including inflight electronic PIREP submission.

“Inflight PIREP submission is the most recent component of our Flight Services Data Link strategy, building on the cockpit to ground communications capability we put in place for inflight Adverse Condition Alerting Service (ACAS) alerts and Surveillance-Enhanced Search and Rescue (SE-SAR),” company officials said in a prepared release. “Every pilot knows the value of PIREPs. Our PIREP submission infrastructure lets you submit PIREPs without contacting Flight Service via radio, and urgent PIREPs are immediately uplinked to other pilots registered for ACAS and flying in the same area. The first two vendors integrating with our PIREP submission infrastructure will be announced at AirVenture Oshkosh, with more coming right behind.”

NextGen Briefings also were enhanced.

“We’ve added color-coded time tags for intersections with adverse conditions, letting you know if a condition is active when passing (red), within an hour of being active (orange), or an hour or more from being active (green),” officials said. “We’ve also reorganized NOTAMs so that less frequently referenced NOTAMs (e.g., airports along the route of flight) are segregated into their own tab, and we’ve added filters to obstruction and Navaid NOTAMs to help you focus on the ones that are relevant to your flight. Plain text translation is now available for several more sections.”

Pilots can also email copies of their briefings to themselves and schedule a briefing to be generated and emailed at a specific time.

All pilot interactions with the web portal have always been recorded. Now pilots can view and print the last 15 days of their transaction history on the website (see History under the Flight Planning & Briefing menu selection).

The company also has implemented its Altitude Optimization tool. It checks two levels above and below the flight plan altitude and provides time and fuel burn estimates based on forecast winds and aircraft performance characteristics. The NavLog function is also available.